Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

The door swung open for her and she hesitated for a moment, wondering if she was making a terrible mistake. But she was desperate for the cash he had promised to bring. Glancing around to check no one from work had seen her, she slipped into the front passenger seat and hastily pulled the door shut.

The interior of the car was even more horrible than its exterior. The bass of the speakers, pounding out some abysmal rap song, physically shook her brain. A pair of furry dice, hanging from the interior mirror, were shaking too. There was a string of blue iridescent lights across the top of the dash that she thought for a moment might be an attempt at Christmas decorations, but which she then realized was there because Reg Okuma thought it was cool.

And the dense reek of the man’s cologne was even more overpowering than the music.

The pleasant surprise was the car’s occupant.

Lynn always tried to form mental images of her clients, and the one she’d had of Reg Okuma, which was a cross between Robert Mugabe and Hannibal Lecter, was a long way off the mark now that, in the glow of the street lights and the blue iridescents, she could see him clearly for the first time.

In his late thirties, she estimated, he was actually good-looking, with an air of strength and confidence about him that reminded her of the actor Denzel Washington. Lean and wiry, with a buzz-cut dome, he was fashionably dressed in a black jacket over a black T-shirt. His fingers were adorned with too many rings, a loose, chunky, gold-link bracelet hung on one wrist and the other sported a watch the size of a sundial.

‘Lynn!’ he said, with a big smile, attempting clumsily to kiss her.

She pulled away, equally clumsily.

‘All day I have been hard, thinking about you. Are you juicy, thinking about me?’

‘Did you bring the money?’ she asked, glancing out of the window, terrified one of her colleagues might walk past and spot her.

‘It’s so vulgar to talk about money on a romantic date, don’t you think, my beautiful?’

‘Let’s drive off,’ she said.

‘Do you like my car? It is the 325 i.’ He emphasized the i . ‘It is the fuel-injection version. It is very fast. It’s not a Ferrari, right? Not yet. But that’s going to happen.’

‘I’m happy for you,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’

‘I need to look at you first,’ he said, turning and staring at her. ‘Oh, you are even more beautiful in the flesh than in my dreams!’

Then, mercifully, he moved the gear lever and the car shot forward.

She looked behind her and saw a canvas bank bag, grabbed it and put it on her lap. Moments later she felt his strong, bony hand on her thigh.

‘We are going to have such beautiful sex tonight, my pretty one!’ he said.

They stopped behind a long queue of cars at the New England Hill lights. She peered into the bag and saw bundles of £50 notes, held by elastic bands. A lot of them.

‘It’s all there,’ he said. ‘Reg Okuma is a man of his word.’

‘Not from my past experience,’ she said, emboldened by the fact there were cars in front of them and behind them. She took out one bundle, which she counted quickly: £1,000.

His hand moved further up her thigh.

Ignoring it as they crept slowly forward, she counted the bundles. Fifteen.

Then suddenly he was pressing right up between her legs. She clenched her thighs and pushed his hand away, firmly. There was no way she was going to sleep with Okuma. Not for £15,000. Not for anything. She just wanted to take the money and get out of here. But even in her desperate state, she knew it was not that simple.

‘We are going to a bar,’ he said, ‘my sweet Lynn. Then I have booked a romantic table. We will have a candlelit dinner, and then we will make the most beautiful love.’

His fingers pressed harder inside her.

The lights changed to green and they crossed, turning left, up the hill. She gripped his hand, removed it and placed it on his own thigh.

‘You make me feel so sexy, Lynn.’

Twenty minutes later they were seated on the outside terrace of the Karma bar, on the boardwalk of Brighton Marina. Despite the fierce glow of the gas heater above them, she was freezing. Reg Okuma puffed on a huge cigar and she sat, huddled in her coat, sipping a whisky sour, which he had insisted she would like – and actually she did. She would have liked it a lot more, though, if they had been inside.

A couple of other tables were also occupied by smokers, otherwise the roped-off terrace was deserted. Below them, in the watery darkness of the Marina basin, yacht rigging clacked and clanked in the biting wind.

‘So, my beauty,’ he said, lifting his glass to his lips, ‘tell me more about you.’

‘First tell me how you know that my daughter is ill,’ she said frostily, keeping up her guard.

He puffed on his cigar and she caught a whiff of the rich, dense smoke. She liked the smell which reminded her of her father at Christmas, when she was a child.

‘Beautiful Lynn,’ he said, in a rich, chiding voice. ‘Brighton and Hove may be a city, but you know, in reality, it is just a small town. I was dating a teacher at your daughter’s school. One night I was picking her up, and I saw you. I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I asked her who you were. She told me about you. That made me desire you even more. You are such a caring person. There are not enough caring people in the world.’

Everyone drove on the left in Cyprus. Which made the country a ready marketplace for fencing stolen British cars. Of course, there were other countries as well, but Cyprus was the most lax at checking up on them. Provided you did a good job of filing off the numbers from the chassis and engine block, and replacing them and the documentation with good forgeries, you weren’t going to have a problem. Vlad Cosmescu had long known, from some of his acquaintances in this city, that if you wanted a car to disappear without trace, the most efficient method was to send it to Cyprus.

He was not a sentimental man, but watching his beloved black SL 55 AMG Mercedes being driven into a container, under the glare of the arc lights on the busy quay of Newhaven Harbour, gave him a twinge of regret. He took a last drag on his cigarette, then tossed it on the ground. A few yards from where he stood, a crane hoisted another container up in the air and swung it towards the deck of a ship. A horn beeped as a driver wove a fork-lift truck through the chaos of crates, containers, people and vehicles.

England had served him well and he’d had a good run in Brighton. But to survive in life, just like in gambling, you had to discipline yourself to quit while you were ahead. With the discovery of the wreck of the Scoob-Eee and the recovery of Jim Towers’s body, at the moment he was ahead by only a very small margin.

Just one more day and then he would be out of here. One last job to take care of. Tomorrow night he would be on a plane to Bucharest. He had a nice pile of cash tucked away. Lots of opportunities open to him. Maybe he would stay in Europe, but there were several other places that took his fancy: Brazil, in particular, where everyone said the girls were beautiful, and many of them were interested in working in the sex trade abroad. Somewhere warm definitely appealed. Somewhere warm with beautiful girls and nice casinos.

The English had an expression for it. How did it go? Something like The world is your oyster .

But maybe marine connotations were not entirely appropriate.

Later they walked back along the wind-blown, almost deserted boardwalk, towards the multistorey car park. Fuelled by three whisky sours and half a bottle of wine Lynn was feeling mellow. And sad for Okuma. He had never known his father. His mother had died of a drugs overdose when he was seven and he’d then been brought up by foster parents who had sexually abused him. After them had followed a series of care homes. At fourteen, he’d joined a Brighton street gang, the only people, he said, who had given him any sense of self-worth.